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Dandelyan — the celebrated London cocktail bar by Ryan Chetiyawardana (Mr Lyan — will close its doors at four years old. The bar held ‘World’s Best Cocktail Bar’ at the Spirited Awards in 2017, and is currently #1 in the World’s 50 Best Bars, ahead of the American Bar at The Savoy Hotel on the Strand. The Lyan team will retain the space at Mondrian London; Chetiyawardana has said: “please don’t ask what’s next.”
Dandelyan was part of Chetiyawardana’s Lyan pride of bars — and new Hoxton restaurant, Cub — that challenged the established norms of bartending: the large quantities of ice, citrus, and time that go into à la minute preparations. Fridges, distillates, concentrates and batch preparation produced a more restrained, no less striking iteration of that messy theatre. It now finds its kin in the aged, pre-mixed, and bottled cocktails that line the backbars of many of London’s most forward-thinking restaurants and drinking dens.
Chetiyawardana announced the news on Instagram:
Business partner and fellow architect of the Lyan group — and by extension, London’s bar landscape — Iain Griffiths, followed suit:
Like its closest sibling, White Lyan, Dandelyan’s menus pivoted on a physical or philisophical concept as a jumping off point for its drink designs. At Dandelyan, it was botany, with cocktails inspired by rootstock grafting, big toothpaste, and the impact of pop culture on agricultural capacity. Across both bars, sustainability — not just its necessity, but what it meaningfully, sustainably looks like — was a compass, with both bars employing a closed-loop approach to waste which suited the global conversation that contextualised that approach.
Chetiyawardana’s announcement is number “1/3” according to his post; given London Cocktail Week 2018 is just around the corner, the timing of the announcement appears very deliberate. As he writes on Instagram, “the landscape, and the conversation, has shifted” — with it, White Lyan made way for Cub and Super Lyan; now Dandelyan makes way too. Global bartending will be asking the question he wishes to evade. What’s next?